When developing new services, service providers are ever mindful of cost. In general, the introduction of new communication services requires a large investment in new infrastructure, not to mention development costs. Given the competitive landscape of communication services, service providers need to be more innovative in seeking new sources of revenue. It is observed that despite the popularity of the Internet and its many applications (even with Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP)), the development of data communications has remained largely independent from voice communications and telephony services. In other words, the advancement in services on the telephony side has not been well integrated on the data network side.
For example, Caller Number Identification Service, commonly known as Caller ID (or CID), is a commonly used telephony feature, supported by wireline and wireless public switched telephone networks (PSTN). Typically, Caller ID information is delivered by the telephone network to telephone handsets or to hardware devices specifically designed to record and display this information. Apart from these conventional methods, this information is not made readily available to end users.
Therefore, there is a need for supporting telephony services, such as Caller ID, over a data network. There is also a need to deploy a communications service that utilizes existing infrastructure. There is a further need to support a new source of revenue for service providers to bill for the telephony services.